Exactly 11 years ago, an unknown Harvard student named Mark Zuckerberg launched a small social network called thefacebook.After 4,018 days, the network has grown tremendously, changed its name, gained 1.39 billion monthly users, reached annual revenues of $12.47 billion and become a $211 billion company.On the 11th birthday of the beloved social network of millions of users worldwide, we decided to take a little peek into the past.
Increased number of users
In the earliest period thefacebook was available only to Harvard students. In March 2004, the service expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale universities. This continued until September 2005, when the service officially changed its name to Facebook. A year later, in September 2006, Facebook opened for general registration.
By then, the company could already boast of major achievements. It had launched Facebook Photos in October 2005 and Facebook for Mobile in April 2006. In September of the same year we saw News Feed.Your first million users Facebook got in December 2004, and a year later there were already 6 million users. By December 2006, the number of users had grown to 12 million, and by December 2007 to 58 million. This phenomenal growth continued uninterrupted until the number reached 360 million in December 2009 and 608 million in December 2010. In October 2012, the social network gained an astounding one billion users worldwide.
Features и tools
If you stand in front of the headquarters Facebook in Menlo Park, California, you will see a giant symbol with a thumbs up. This is the well-known bark, which Facebook came up with it in 2009.
In the same year, the company launched Facebook UsernamesThe network launched a new version of the network, which allowed users to enter their real names into their accounts. At the end of 2011, the network launched Timeline - chronological user history FacebookIn January 2013. Facebook presented Graph Search - semantic search engine, and in December 2014 created its mobile version.Mobile tools FacebookThe key to the company's financial future is, without a doubt, the key to the company's future. Already today, 1.19 billion people use mobile apps every month. And that's not counting the 700 million users WhatsAppas well as 300 million users Instagram. In addition, another 500 million people use Messenger app.
Conflicts
Despite the fact that, for the most part, all the achievements Facebook always went over well, the company did get into various conflicts.In addition to the general frustration on Wall Street after the company went public, there was a lot of dissatisfaction about the ever-changing protection of personal data. In late 2011, the company agreed to accusations from the U.S. Trade Federal Commission, which said that Facebook allowed itself to change users' private settings without obtaining consent.In addition, the company paid $20 million in court orders for being found guilty of violating users' privacy with its ads.Of course, it's impossible to remember everything that Facebook made in 11 years. However, no one will argue that the company is at the top, where it has been diligently led since 2004 by an ordinary Harvard student.After all these years, the company has become an integral part of the lives of users who communicate with friends and family anywhere in the world, and of vendors who see in the service a goldmine thanks to the possibility to reach billions of people. And only time will tell if Zuckerberg and his company will be able to stay on top or if they will be thrown off the pedestal by a new and more original service.
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